It is well-known in the art that operating characteristics of a communications device, in particular of a telephone can be selected for signaling an incoming message or call. In particular, almost all today's telephones provide the possibility of adjusting the volume and the timbre or tone color of the ringing tone so that a user of a telephone can choose the quality of the ringing tone.
In addition, as described in EP 0 611 070 A2 the operating characteristics of a mobile telephone such as the volume of an output signal, the volume of the ringing tone, and the generation of tones can be modified so that the mobile telephone can be conveniently used in any environment. In order to facilitate the modification of the plurality of operating characteristics a plurality of profiles or groups are defined for these characteristics. Each profile or group includes predetermined values of all these operating characteristics and the selection of a particular profile or group results in a plurality of operating characteristics being modified simultaneously.
Thus, when moving from one environment to another a user only has to make a single menu selection resulting in a plurality of operating characteristics being modified simultaneously.
EP 1 117 245 A1 discloses a method that enables a calling telephone to choose a ringing indication to be played and/or shown at a receiving telephone. For choosing a ringing indication the user of the calling telephone first selects a ringing indication from a data file. Thereafter the user enters the telephone number to place a call to a desired telephone. During building up the connection or circuit from the calling telephone to the called telephone the selected ringing indication is sent to the called telephone that is activated in a manner of the ringing indication that was selected by the calling user at his/her telephone.
Further, ringing indication (sound and/or visual) can be predefined by a user in accordance with the class of an incoming call. To remotely choose the ringing indication intended to be used with a specific class of calls the calling user has to assign the call a class when placing a call. Thus, a call class information is sent to the telephone to be called and there predefined ringing indication is selected in accordance with the call class information for signaling the incoming call.
Therefore, it is possible for a user of a telephone to select specific ringing indications for specific call classes, for example official calls, private calls, urgent calls, standard calls and the like to that the signaling of the call indicates the cal to the telephone user defined by the different ringing indications for different call classes.
Furthermore, U.S. Pat. No. 6,297,726 B1 discloses a radio paging receiver that can be operated in two modes. In a first mode the pager activates light and sound alarms for indicating an incoming message regardless of who the caller is. In a second, password select mode, the pager activates the light and sound alarms only for callers who have transmitted a password with there messages to the pager. Therefore, it is possible to discriminate among those callers who have the password transmitted, only activating both the light and sound alarms when pre-selected callers are detected as transmitting a message to the pager. If a message from a caller who is not selected is received, only the light alarm is activated and the message is displayed.
Hence, it is already known to select one of two message signaling modes in dependence on a received password indicating that the calling party is allowed or not to cause a specific priority signaling mode.
In addition, WO 97/32439 discloses a terminal for a communications network, the terminal being capable of supporting a plurality of applications and having means of communicating user messages. In particular, the terminal comprises means for receiving user messages having data and a header relating to one of the applications and means for addressing the data of a received message to a respective application according to the header. The messages that can be communicated by this known terminal are short messages and/or so called smart messages.
Short messages, that are called hereinafter SMS, are messages according to the Short Messaging Service standard. Smart messages are a special kind of SMS, the header of which includes information about how to use the information of the data portion. Enhanced messages, that are called hereinafter EMS, are messages according to the Enhanced Messaging Service standard. Multi media messages called hereinafter MMS are messages according to the Multi Media Messaging Service standard.